Lessons
Lesson Info
Fostering Community
Fostering community. I'm such a big fan of fostering community online, it's not about you, and so what I wanna say is there is no silver bullet to Pinterest and that there is no silver bullet to growing a big following, but there is a golden rule, oh my gosh, community first, self second. So for me I know that we're all here today to learn how to market our businesses and we are passionate and we care about getting the word out but at the end of the day you have to put other people first and not yourself and the second you start just focusing on yourself, you get spammy and people don't like it, and they're not gonna wanna follow you. Why in the world would I want to follow an account that just talks about themselves? I don't. So I would say, if you're getting on Pinterest, don't just make it about you and only sharing your stuff. So how do you get engagement, how does this happen? Well there's a lot of different kinds of engagement that can happen on Pinterest, and hopefully you want ...
to get a mix of all of these. It's not just about clicking your website so you want people ultimately to follow you, you want them to try-- Pinterest has a whole tried it section I don't know if you guys have tried it, but you can now try pins and give feedback on your experience, how great is that? How great to know that if I have a new product and I put it out there, people can say they've tried it and if they liked it or not. You can do that. So that's a type of engagement you might wanna point your followers to, say, hey guys I'm on Pinterest, have you tried my pins? If you have, make sure to give me some feedback! You can comment, of course, and you can save, which is like another word for re-pin, saving things to your boards. You can buy products, if you guys have seen those buyable pins where you can use the shopping cart and get the product right away without even having to go over to a website, which is awesome. And then of course you can click through to websites. So those are the different types of engagement that happen on Pinterest. And what you wanna do, is you wanna look, because you have this business account, you wanna look at what is happening with the pins you're sharing. So are people saving them, are they clicking on them, you can look in your Pinterest insights and see your most clicked pins, your most saved pins, check out what is resonating, and then iterate on that, thinking, oh wow I had no idea people really love my recipes maybe I should produce more of that content, or man they really didn't like that outfit maybe it's not a good one! You know, and to get engagement you wanna make sure you're focusing on curation, so ultimately if you're sharing content that's falling flat on Pinterest, Pinterest isn't gonna be likely to recommend you as someone to follow. You know, so they're definitely taking a look at what's happening with the content you're sharing. You wanna make sure that you're consistently pinning. It's very important to be consistent. This is true with any algorithm, be consistent, don't just come in, pin like 50 pins on Monday and sign off and then come in on Monday. Come in every day, experience the platform everyday, connect with your community every day and give them something to engage with. You wanna aim for about 10-12 pins a day. That's so manageable, I mean, if you guys are using Pin-- most people use Pinterest on mobile, if you're using it on your phone that's like, you know you're waiting for your doctor's appointment, get on Pinterest and share some ideas there. Only pin what you love as I talked about. Stay organized, so make sure that this content can be found in good places and share from your website daily. There's nothing wrong with sharing from your website. I made, one of my big mistakes was in the first two years, I didn't share much from my website at all because I thought it was bad, like I didn't want to be self promotional, but we have ideas and we should feel bad about sharing them so share away, share away! Have at least one branded board, that's just my personal preference, not something from Pinterest, but just me and how I do it, and then linking them in multiple places, and multiple pins to the same destination so if you have a great blog post and you have five images within the post, or five images related to that post, making sure that you're sharing all of those. Cuz who knows, maybe the one pin that you think is really stellar, isn't the one that resonates with the community, it's this other close up of the bread instead of the close up of the cheese, who knows? You wanna take the opportunity to test it, there's nothing wrong with that. Good content is king. Ultimately you have to find good content. So how do you do that? Where do you find it? You can use your home feed. So right when you login, there's idea coming right at you. When someone creates an account on Pinterest, they choose interests, things they're interested in, and that helps populate your home feed to things that you like. Use your search bar. Most people use Pinterest with the search bar, saying you know, spaghetti recipes or kids birthday party ideas. Their general searches, usually really high level searches, like with idea in the word, you know so that's just like a great starting point and then as you scroll you can use the related pins feature, which is where you find a pin, you're like yeah, I love this balloon DIY, I don't know if I want that exact thing but I want something like it, so if you close up on a pin and you scroll down you'll see a ton of other pins that look just like that, it's the best thing ever, it's how you fall into a rabbit whole, you know? Yeah, that's right. And visit your friends' profiles! Oh my gosh. I love looking at what so and so is pinning, I can always find out if they're about to have a baby and I didn't know about it, I mean it's a way to kinda creep on people and Pinterest just launched a new tab where you can go to, you can, instead of just your home feed you can go over to your follower tab and you can see a whole feed of everyone, everything that your followers are pinning, everything that people you are following are pinning. So it's kinda taking it back to the OG Pinterest where it was all chronological and every, seeing everything that your friends were pinning, so they gave you two options and they listened to their community and they wanted to create the best experience for you guys. I love Pinterest because they listen to the community, they're the best. So something to note about Pinterest is there's definitely seasonality on the platform so as we know people are coming to discover ideas and they're planning, so they're thinking about the future, so people are actually planning this about 45 days in advance, so if you know that you have a holiday product, and December is a really big time for you, you wanna be able to share that content well in advance and give people ideas on how to implement that product well in advance. It's almost thinking like a magazine, like editorials, you know when magazines talk about Spring fashion before it's even warm outside? I mean that's how the Pinterest community is. But that's so great because it helps you connect with your customer at the beginning of the customer's journey so it helps you say oh you're getting married, you're thinking about photography, let me show you my photography. This is my style, oh yeah maybe I do really like this light, bright, airy style, I'm really connecting with this you know it helps you nurture that relationship long before they're gonna take action. And then you wanna make sure you're pinning consistently those same ideas so if you know that you're talking about holiday, leading up to the holiday continue sharing holiday ideas, even though they started planning long before you just wanna continue that message.
Ratings and Reviews
Crystal Cervantes
This class was awesome! I have never really thought about how to use Pinterst to help build my brand. The only thing I wish she would touch on is how to collaborate and communicate to reach other Pinterest influencers.
Joshua Proto
Amazing! I had never thought of Pinterest as a meaningful ad platform, but I was super wrong! If one has a physical product or market in the lifestyle or fashion sectors they need to seriously consider this platform. Alexandra is easy to understand and presents her information in an engaging and thorough style. She truly is a Pinterest master!
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